Direct manufacturing, also referred to as rapid manufacturing or rapid prototyping, refers to a variety of manufacturing techniques that allow items to be formed directly from their constituent materials without requiring the often time-consuming and costly creation of dies or molds which are later used to impart the material with the desired shapes of the items. One such direct manufacturing technique is Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) in which light, such as laser light, is controllably directed onto particles of a material to cause the particles to fuse together into a desired shape. The material, such as powdered plastic, is placed in a vat or the like upon which the SLS technique operates. The resultant parts are formed in the powder from which they are dug out. FIG. 1 shows a vat of a typical SLS machine after the formation of parts from a powdered plastic material. The parts are typically further subjected to a stream of pressurized air to blow off any powder remaining thereon.
The handling of parts formed by techniques such as SLS can be problematic, particularly where there are large numbers of small parts involved. Parts can be lost in the powder or in the process of blowing the powder off of the parts. While other manufacturing techniques such as injection molding and extrusion may not suffer from such handling issues, the drawbacks of such techniques, such as their greater up-front costs and slower turn-around, may preclude their use or make them unattractive alternatives for many applications.
Furthermore, after the parts are manufactured, they often need to be packaged, such as by being placed in a container. After being retrieved and cleaned, as described above, the parts may then typically be sorted, counted and placed in a container. An additional operation may be required to form the container. The container may need to be labeled. All of these steps add time, effort and cost.